Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical device for sensing marks carried on an area to be sensed of a medium, especially printed and/or handwritten patterns.
In particular, the present invention relates to an optical line detecting apparatus for detecting lines printed with commonly available dot-matrix or other impact printers, or lines written by hand on bank passbooks, normal pages or similar media. When combined with the proper decoding electronics and software, this invention can also be used to recognize optical line patterns such as bar codes identifying bank passbook page numbers or other similar application.